On
Friday evening I decided to take a walk to a nearby restaurant.
By nearby I mean a couple of city blocks away, although describing
my walk in terms of “blocks” doesn’t quite do justice to the
fact that the restaurant in question inhabits not a street
so much as a tunnel within a labyrinthine indoor urban shopping
mall. It was pretty nippy outside—an hour or so later, it
would snow—but I didn’t put on my coat. Out the door I went,
down the hall to the elevator, down the elevator to the hotel
lobby, through the lobby and into the bowels of a strange
urban organism that has quietly been spreading like crabgrass
throughout a section of Boston’s Back Bay in recent years.

Just
outside the hotel lobby, I passed a Starbucks, where much
earlier that Friday I had noticed men and women in business
attire buying their morning coffee. I continued past a series
of shops until I entered a glass-sided walkway through which
I could see that I was crossing over Huntington Avenue. The
walkway fed me onto an escalator, which led me into a gleaming
new (well, it must be pretty new, I think—I had never noticed
it before) multiuse indoor environment comprising two floors
of retail stores and restaurants, an 11-screen movie theater,
four seven-story office buildings and 1,400 parking spaces,
and connecting directly to two hotels, the Westin (where I
was staying) and the Marriott. Actually, one of the retail
floors of Copley Place—as the whole structure apparently is
called—flows so seamlessly into the Marriott lobby that it
would be the envy of any modern-day Martin Dressler, the titular
hotel-building character of the Steven Millhauser novel, who
ultimately is brought down by his increasingly grandiose designs
that try to stuff too many of life’s various attractions under
one roof.

But my
quest at the moment was not to try and understand the appeal
of such hermetically sealed urban environments—or why the
young tourist couple wanted to have their picture taken in
front of the ersatz waterfall in the retail area’s central
atrium—but to see if I could find my way through the indoor
maze to Marché Mövenpick, the Canadian-based restaurant chain
that is a breakfast favorite of my two young sons. So I proceeded
through the Marriott lobby, past another Starbucks, until—Eureka!
I was standing at the mouth of another glass-enclosed walkway,
this one also crossing over Huntington Avenue (as I crossed,
I waved at my hotel, which was only about 50 yards away, though
my serpentine indoor walk had been much longer) to the Prudential
Center, which has its own maze of indoor retail arcades connecting
the Prudential Tower, the Hynes Convention Center, another
parking garage and yet another hotel, the Sheraton. I sensed
that I was close (I had stayed previously at the Sheraton,
which was how I knew there was a Marché underneath), though
I walked a fair distance more down gleaming corridors of Ann
Taylors and Sunglass Huts and Au Bon Pains before my quarry
finally came into view.

The walk
from the Westin to Marché is somewhat shorter outside, on
city streets, but I knew my kids would find the maze of indoor
arcades and enclosed walkways more exciting. So when I returned
to our hotel room, I announced, “I have it all figured out
now. It’s all connected.”

And indeed,
the next morning, and the morning after that, my wife, kids
and I retraced my route through the tunnels of the sealed-in
city. The walk was pleasant enough, the kids were happy, we
did not have to worry about automobiles hurtling toward them,
the fresh-fruit smoothies and café au lait were as satisfying
as ever, and certain family members did succumb to the siren
songs of retailers lined up along the corridors to intercept
us. I noted the similarities to Montreal, whose underground
city connects many different “neighborhoods” of shops, restaurants,
offices and hotels, offering a weather- and car-free alternative
to negotiating the same routes above ground. I also noted
one significant difference: Aside from the parking garages,
Boston’s Copley Place and Prudential complexes do not offer
direct access to transportation: A train station and several
subway stops are nearby, but you do have to go outside to
get to them. In Montreal, the two main intracity rail stations
and a number of subway stations are integral nodes of the
underground city.

But more
than anything, I noted how little this new brand of urban
“village” has anything to do with the actual city around it.
Whatever appeal its amenities may have to a shopper, an office
worker or a hotel guest, they are amenities you can get in
virtually any city in North America: They are amenities provided
by huge corporate chains that thrive on their ability to replicate
familiar experiences and reduce the pressure to seek new ones.
From Marriott to Starbucks, from the movie multiplex to my
kids’ beloved Marché, they say as much about Boston and its
culture as a McDonald’s hamburger eaten in Red Square would
say about Moscow. And while Back Bay’s growing indoor village
has by no means taken over the city, it makes me just a little
bit troubled to think that such developments might be designed
to allow visitors to get in and out of a city without actually
having to interact with it.

Of course,
we did spend a good portion of our visit to Boston trying
to see Boston, whether visiting museums, negotiating the busy
and colorful subways, or strolling through neighborhoods in
Cambridge and in Boston’s South and North ends. Returning
from the North End one afternoon, we passed through Haymarket,
Boston’s old-world outdoor mob scene of a market that is still
a robust melting pot of people and fresh food despite the
chaotic construction going on all around it. The kids seemed
to delight in the sights, sounds and smells of this feisty
place, and my son Denis, surveying the many offerings around
him, finally decided that he wanted a Golden Delicious apple.
After several bites, he looked up at me, smiled, and said
it was the best apple he had ever had. Although it’s likely
that that had little or nothing to do with the fact that the
apple was from Haymarket and that he was eating it outdoors
with the bustle of the city all around him, at that particular
moment it registered how good it felt to be someplace real.